


i wanna taste the way that you bleed

by electrahearts



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Ableist Language, Alternate Universe - Hitmen, Alternate Universe - Mob, Consensual Infidelity, F/F, F/M, Minor Character Death, Non-Graphic Sex, Polyamory, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-23
Updated: 2013-07-23
Packaged: 2017-12-21 03:14:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/895124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/electrahearts/pseuds/electrahearts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They go straight to the top, because if they’re going to do this right, they’re going to do it right, and Lydia Martin hires them within two days of Erica’s twentieth birthday.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i wanna taste the way that you bleed

Erica has three rules when it comes to the mob. One, always follow orders. Two, keep the kill clean. Three, break these rules whenever you can get away with it.

\--

They only screw up once, in Vermont, when they’re still on their own. The mark is young, and they feel invincible. Erica is nineteen.

“We can do this the easy way, or the hard way. Your choice,” she says, smiling like predator at prey, and she feels Isaac shake with silent laughter behind her at her dramatics. She wonders if she should do like Kali has, and file her teeth into points. It’d make an impression, and she’s all about impressions.

The man shoots and she ducks, whirling under his guard to press a knife to his neck. Sometimes these men forget that her nickname is the Cat for a reason. 

“If you shoot him, I’ll carve out your larynx and not put it back. I may not have liked school much, but even I know where the larynx is. And if I miss, I’ll just have to try again, won’t I?” she tells him conversationally. He shoots her instead.

“Erica!” she hears Isaac scream, and there’s the sound of a thump and three shots, and the creaking of wood as it groans underneath her weight. It sounds hollow, and she thinks dizzily that at least they found where he was stashing his coke.

Isaac kneels beside her and presses his balled up shirt to her side, and together they watch the blue fabric soak up the blood. He doesn’t need to tell her that the mark is dead.

“Never again,” he says, and she nods, teeth clenched. They go straight to the top after that, because if they’re going to do this right, they’re going to do it _right_ , and Lydia Martin hires them within two days of Erica’s twentieth birthday. 

\--

“This is Cora. You’ll work with her,” Lydia says, her tone forbidding questions or disagreement. Erica nods, her eyes darting sideways to look at Derek, forever by Lydia’s side. He looks both relieved and anxious, an expression she’s never seen on him. She hasn’t seen many expressions on him, actually, he has the whole wall of stone thing down pat.

“Don’t worry, we’ll take care of your girl,” she tells him, lips curling in amusement.

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” he says wryly, but his shoulders slacken almost imperceptibly, and she knows they’ve done well.

She doesn’t trust this Cora, though, no matter how important she is to Derek. Isaac comes first, always, and if Cora gets them into trouble then she won’t hesitate to ditch her or kill her. If they have to disappear in fear of Derek and Lydia’s wrath, then so be it. They’ve done it before.

“Derek wants me to work with you. I don’t know why,” Cora says in distaste, and Erica laughs. She saves Cora’s life two months later when the mark proves more stubborn than expected and decides to try shooting Cora rather than give up half a million dollars. Cora doesn’t ever say thank you, but Erica fucks her on the bathroom floor that night, tiles pressing into her back and her spine going numb, and after that Cora is hers.

\--

Stiles is the research expert - he looks into whoever is trying to buy their services this time and sees whether it’s worth bothering Lydia about it. He’s also the one who buys her disposable phones and tells them where to go. 

(And once, a long time ago, when Lydia first hired her, she thought she might be able to fall for him.)

“Erica, you’re solo on this one,” he tells her, handing her a slim silver phone and a drivers license. The mark. “It’s nothing big; it’s just that Lydia thinks he’s been taking an extra cut of the gambling money.”

“Just a regular afternoon, then?” she teases, smiling brightly.

“A bit boring, really. Peter says they’re keeping mostly on the line because of the whole Costra affair, you know. No one wants to end up nailed to their front door like him,” Stiles muses, frowning into his coffee. His phone beeps and he answers it immediately, waiting for the person on the other end to speak first.

“I’m off,” she whispers, and he waves her off without a second glance. She steals his coffee for that; if she’s gotten out of bed for a half-assed task, she might as well be awake for it.

The job goes smoothly, as they always do, but she misses Isaac and Cora. They make it more fun, though she can’t deny the thrill of power that races up her spine when she leans over the mark’s bruised face. 

“The Martins send their regards. They recommend that you try to be completely honest with them in your dealings in the future, otherwise more drastic measures may have to be taken,” she recites, just enough venom in her voice to mask how bored she is. It’s her third time acting like a loan shark’s hit woman in a week, and she’s already over it. Arson and murder are more her speed - you can get more of a performance out of those.

“Though personally, I hope you keep screwing up. Maybe then we can have some _fun_ ,” she finishes dramatically as she stalks towards the doorway, leaving him collapsed and bleeding against his bedroom dresser.

\--

Sometimes she sends Cora to the mark first, tentative and demure, watches her put her hand on the mark’s thigh and pretend that she isn’t a killer. She wishes she could see the part where Cora ties the mark to a chair, but she supposes she could always get Cora to recreate it with Isaac.

“Did you wanna go upstairs?” she watches Cora say, exactly as rehearsed, and she refuses to look anywhere near Isaac for fear of bursting out laughing at how different this Cora is to the real one. 

(Cora tells her, late one night when Isaac is out, that she had wanted to be an actress until a psycho burned down her house and killed most of her family. She can see why that would put a damper on big city dreams.)

Cora rings within eight minutes, the fastest they’ve ever done it. 

“Remember not to touch him with your bare skin. I don’t want to have to deal with police attempting to track us with your DNA.” There’s silence on the other end of the phone; she can practically hear Cora’s raised eyebrows. 

“Alright, we’re on our way up,” she says hastily, not wanting to hear Cora ask if she thinks Cora’s an idiot, not least because when Cora gets sassy and offended, Erica gets turned on, and she needs her head clear. 

She hangs up the phone and turns to Isaac, leaning casually against the wall. 

“Showtime, babe,” she says, her eyes lighting up, and her red lips tug into a wide grin that matches his. This is their favourite part, more than the extortion and the maiming and the power. They like the performance, the feeling of getting away with fucking everyone over right under their noses.

She falls against him a little, running her hands through his hair and giggling, biting at his lips and neck and every bit of skin she can reach to leave cherry coloured marks all over him. He runs his hands up the back of her shirt, hot against her skin, and if they had more time and weren’t about to kill someone, she’d probably fuck him in the corridor. His hand taps the centre of her spine, just once, and she stops sucking a truly impressive hickey into the tender skin where his neck meets his shoulder, and begins dragging him out of the bar and towards the front desk.

She pauses in front of the clerk, assessing him briefly; Isaac takes the opportunity to lean closer to her and bite at her neck. She giggles, just as rehearsed, and the clerk gives a nearly imperceptible jump as he looks up from whatever he’s doing below the desk.

“Sorry ma’am, how can I help you?”

“We’re room 207, we’ve forgotten our key and - Chris!” she breaks off, pretending to admonish Isaac for pushing her shirt up past her hip. She leans over the counter. “As you can see, he’s getting a little impatient to take this upstairs, if you know what I mean,” she finishes with a wink, shifting so that he has a better view of her cleavage. It’s obvious, but people like obvious. They like being able to slot people into boxes and forget about them, and Erica is the best at walking the line between memorable and invisible. In an hour’s time, this boy will only remember two adults making out against his desk, and that the woman had flirted with him. At best, he might remember that she’s blonde.

“Uh, of course ma’am. 207?” he questions, and she nods, glitter in her eyes. He blushes slightly and leans under the desk to grab the key while she takes the opportunity to check the clock. Shit, a minute behind now. She slides her hand in Isaac’s back pocket to let him know to speed things up, and he presses a kiss to her exposed shoulder. Message received.

“Come _on_ , babe. Don’t be such a tease,” Isaac whispers just loudly enough for the clerk to hear, and Erica flashes an apologetic smile at him as Isaac rips the proffered key out of the clerk’s hand and drags her down the hallway.

The kill goes well; she gains access to both his safe and his offshore bank account before Isaac kills him, and even though the money is nowhere near enough to cover his debt for the amount of times he’s hired one of their escorts, Lydia will be happy. It’s more the principle of the thing than anything else, showing whoever may be watching that they can’t fuck the Martins around.

\--

They stay up till midnight on New Year’s, and she rides him slowly as their apartment gets lit up with fireworks. She would admire the timing if Isaac hadn’t gotten it into his head to tease her, and she’s so frustrated she’s about to call Cora and have phone sex with her instead. She wishes Cora were here, instead of wherever Derek told her to be.

“Ugh, _move_ ,” she stresses when he pauses, and she’s about to take matters into her own hands when he shushes her. 

“Excuse y-“

“Erica, _shut up_.” His eyes flicker toward the doorway, and even in the dark she can see his muscles tense. “There’s someone here. Mo-“

The swings open with a bang, one of the glass panels near her head shattering almost simultaneously. Derek had called them needless luxuries, and if she survives this she’ll tell him he was right, because this would be a lot easier if she didn’t have to pull glass out of her skin. She sighs at the thought, because she hates Derek being right, and then again because she _hates_ fighting naked. Well, the kind of fighting that doesn’t end in sex, anyway.

Isaac stands, pulling his favourite gun from under the pillow and shooting twice at the shadows moving in the dark. There’s an answering thump, and Erica takes the time smirk in satisfaction before the sound of crunching glass diverts her attention.

“Cat,” the man greets when she spins around. Not a personal assassination attempt, then. Those usually greet her by her real name, not the one the mob circuit gave her.

She doesn’t bother with a response, just kicks out with both feet. She hits his stomach with less power than if she had had shoes on, and the man grabs her left foot, missing her right by inches. She twists, landing with a crash in the scattered glass, and though she can feel it embedding itself in her bare skin, it gives her hope.

“We’re playing games, are we? He said that the Cat liked her games.” She rolls her eyes at the dramatics, though she does file away the pronoun for future thinking. She would be the first to admit that she loves a good performance, but that’s exactly it - _good_. Cliché performances like this, like a villain straight out of Disney, should be reserved for the masses. She’s quite insulted on her own behalf, actually, that she doesn’t deserve something better.

He leans down, gun in hand, and she grabs a handful of glass beside her and flings it in his eyes, watching the blood trickle out with deep seated satisfaction.

“You done?” Isaac asks, coming up behind where the man is clutching futilely at his eyes.

“Almost,” she says, and pulls the gun from the man’s hands. Her shot hits him dead between the eyes, and she doesn’t hear him breathe again.

\--

The problem with being the best is that you become kind of famous, and it’s fairly difficult to lure your mark to where you want them when they recognise you on sight and attempt to run away. Erica doesn’t mind; she likes the chase and so does Isaac, but it makes the hit messier than it should be. Erica likes messy. Lydia doesn’t.

“He got away?” Lydia seethes, staring at Erica in disbelief. As she should, really, because Erica and Isaac have never missed a hit before. “Derek, can you-“ 

Derek steps forward from his dark corner - she’ll never understand his affinity for those - and together they watch Lydia stalk from the room.

“I don’t know what the problem is - we know where he is now,” she shrugs. “Isaac and Cora are on it, we’ll have the money within the hour,” she finishes, somewhat annoyed. She had wanted to be the one going after the mark, but they had had a scissors-paper-rock tournament and she had lost.

“The problem, _Cat_ , is that now he has the opportunity to make contact with people and get further away. You don’t seem to understand that,” Derek replies, his voice getting louder and louder as he steps toward her. She refuses to look scared.

“The _problem_ is that now people are going to know that our top people couldn’t catch a single man. That my _sister_ couldn’t catch a man.”

“I think your sister has caught more men than you’d think,” she tries to joke, but Derek glares so fiercely she thinks his eyes might fall out of his head. “Look-“

“No, you look,” he interrupts. “I thought I taught you how to survive.” 

Her ‘I taught myself, thanks’ goes unnoticed. 

“Failing to get what we want? That’s a weakness. _That’s_ how people end up dead. We’re better than most, but we aren’t invincible,” he says angrily. “I don’t want to see you bleeding out on the side of the road, Erica,” he says, more gently now, but with the same intensity. She shivers. It’s moments like these that she remembers why they call Derek the Wolf.

“Aw, do you like me now, Derek?”

“My sister likes you, and for some reason I like her. Don’t break her heart, Erica.”

She nods, because there’s nothing else she can do. She slips away the moment he takes his eyes off her and goes to their apartment to wait. It isn’t long before Isaac and Cora tumble through the door, all smiles and a hint of blood, and she kisses them both until she’s no longer the one wearing bright red lipstick. 

\--

“Kiss me,” she whispers into the dark one night, and someone slides their hand between hers and presses their lips together. It’s hard, what she does, but it’s the only thing she’s good at besides fucking, and she’ll do it till she dies. Her death will be sooner rather than later, Stiles has read her the statistics, so she’ll take advantage of every minute she has. She might kill and maim and torture for a living, but she loves these two people more than anything. It doesn’t hurt that they’re both fantastic kissers, and she’s rather fond of that, too.


End file.
